Month 11 Food Blogging & Income Report – September 2016

Welcome to our 11th food blogging and income report for September 2016.

You know what I believe to be the number 1 reason for success on a food blog? It is not how many social shares a particular blog post had or whether or not one of your blog posts went viral. It also has nothing to do with book deals, having the perfect niche or the catchy domain name. In the same way it has nothing to do with how old your food blog is.

The number 1 reason is the personal touch and putting yourself out there.

There are millions of food blogs on the internet and by putting yourself out there and having that personal touch you will stand out from the crowd. This is after all why blogs where invented in the first place before any of us starting making money from them or seeing them as a business model. They were designed as online diaries in order to share our own personal thoughts, not as a way to produce lots of content under the hope that some of it would become popular and some of it would make us rich.

I blog from a personal point of view and have done so many times over the last 8 years since I started my very first blog. I had a expat one talking about my new adventures living in Portugal, one about my month following the Whole 30, another about how Dominic & I lost over 100 pounds and even an internet marketing one sharing my adventures online.

They each were written from the heart and would always come across personalised and I would never write from the third persons point of view.

Dominic would even joke every now and again that there was nothing left for us to blog about as I had covered all aspects of our life.

The reason I am telling you this is because next time you write a blog post or if you are in the early stages of planning your blog content just think of how you can share your stories in a way that will excite your readers and will make people see you above the competition.

I am not saying that you must share every family picture or your family tree on your blog, as I don’t do this very often myself, but what I am saying is that you tell the story behind the recipe. What made you come up with it, what you liked about it, what the kids thought about it, how often you will make it and so forth.

It will engage your audience and they will no longer think that you are just yet another food blog. Plus with so many spam looking food blogs that come across that they are just in it for the money it will give you this amazing X Factor.

But I am sure you want to know how much the personal touch can earn you per month so here is our income for September 2016.

This leads to a total income from Recipe This For September 2016 of $2071.67

We all talk about life getting in the way of our online business don’t we? The fact that running a blog and a full time job can be too difficult and as a result its content to your blog or the promotion of that content that gets put on the back burner.

Well the truth is that if you plan around what you have going on in your life then your blog can simply run as normal.

Take us for example. This is Jorge and he entered our world on the 26th of September weighing in at 2.3 kilos:

It is hard work managing kids and a blogging business. We had done as much blogging as we could and scheduled it in advance. Apart from this post and 3 date sensitive pieces of content, everything has been scheduled up until the 2nd of November. This meant that we could be super unorganised during those first few days, knowing full well that the content would go out as usual.

The worst that has happened is that the initial social media promotions of the posts have been a day behind and I think that is rather impressive.

Here I am writing this income report for you from our home office. Dominic is in the office too next to me doing today’s social media. Our newborn is asleep in his car seat on our desk in between the two of us. Our eldest son is in the house babysitting his little sister. This of course, is the benefit of having a 15 year old son!

Dinner = in the slow cooker ready for us for later and I am trying to overlook the fact that I only got 6 hours of broken sleep last night thanks to baby night feeds and a toddler with a bad cold.

Running a food blog is of course a lot of hard work but with great planning you can really get the content out there and get it to flow. I know many food bloggers don’t schedule in advance and I don’t think I could cope like that as things have a habit of popping up and ruining your plans.

Sponsored Opportunities

We are really enjoying doing the sponsored opportunities now on RecipeThis.com. It was something that we always planned to be a big focus on the blog and now we have a decent amount of traffic (well low compared to some blogs) we are now in a position to be able to work with a lot of different brands.

We started out of course offering free reviews in exchange for products but that was to create a portfolio and this has had a great impact on the deals we are getting now.

I was reading an article on Facebook last week and someone was talking about why on earth people bother with Adsense when it pays so little if you don’t have a lot of traffic. Well this is why I suggest that we all diversify our income that way Google Adsense becomes one part of it rather than the headline piece. But you can understand why people are put off by it as my Adsense income for the month is less than I charge for writing one recipe review and after all I would be writing recipes anyway.

I have also found that rather than sticking with agencies such as IZEA, by going out looking for your own sponsored reviews can make you a lot more money and help build up your relationships with brands.

On many blogs you will either make the most money from sponsored reviews or from the sale of your own ebooks or services. So think about that when you are building up your site and how you plan to monetise in the future.

Recipe This Blog Traffic September 2016

We had a traffic slump in June, a good July, a good August and naturally we wanted a good September………

Here is our traffic for September 2016:

As you can see we also had a great September! In fact it was so good that compared to June which was just a few short months ago, we have doubled our traffic. It is just amazing to say that in 90 days you could actually double your traffic!

Here are our top 10 traffic sources for RecipeThis.com during September:

For our traffic we have just continued to do what we know works. We share our content as it goes live, we reshare it a week later, we feature it at ideal moments such as when something seasonal comes up and we are all for Pinterest Groups.

We have not had that big bad hit for a long time. Such as when your post takes off on social media or when you get that amazing stumbleupon boost. None of that has happened, there is no luck it is just a lot of hard work!

Our social media has begun to pay off though as we have now hit 25,000 followers across the different social media channels and we have a lot of interaction and expect excellent growth throughout the winter months as well as next year and beyond.

There is a lot of my fellow bloggers that are just on one or two social media channels. Well I say get on them all and see how you can use each of them to increase your brand and build up your social media shares.

Are You Hosting Pop Ups?

Google has recently announced that for those of you that have SEO in mind for your traffic that sites that have pop ups that annoy the readers will get badly hit in the January Panda update.

This means if you have a pop up on the screen that stops a reader from reading the content that they came on the site to read then you need to either get rid of it or expect an SEO traffic dip.

We don’t have any like this as we hate the experience it gives the reader. But I was on a food blog last night and I was opening about 6 different blog posts in new windows (so that I could have a good read) and each one of them had a Media Vine ad popping up on my screen stopping me from reading the content. It drove me mad and I ended up closing down the browser windows and giving up on it.

I used these pop ups in the old days of internet marketing when they were popular for getting either Facebook page likes or for getting subscribers on your mailing list. But they had a very low sign up rate and a lot of bloggers ditched them a few years back.

If you do have them on your site think of alternative places to put them. For example I got the best sign up rate at the bottom of blog posts after people had finished reading my content.

What’s Next?

Next on the agenda for us is to enjoy family life as a new family of five. You only have that first month with your newborn baby once and I really want to enjoy it. While I am enjoying it I will be finishing my content for October, working on November and December’s content and just maintaining my food blog.

The content part of it is the hard part, so as long as that is kept up to date then I am happy!

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We’re The Milners

Hello we’re the Milners and we run RecipeThis.com from our country cottage in Southern Portugal. The Milners is made up of husband and wife duo Dominic & Samantha along with their kids Kyle, Sofia & Jorge. They love cooking with local Mediterranean ingredients and are addicted to chocolate. If they could cook for the rest of their lives with just kitchen gadgets then they would!.

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